This course focuses on British and Irish fiction from roughly the first third of the twentieth century, and how that literature highlights relationships between modernity and modernism, history and form, artistic theory and practice. Part of our approach will be to identify voice and view, looking to the formal, or narratological, choices that help shape our idea of the modern novel and short stories. Moreover, we will address the central themes in broader contexts, accounting for intellectual perspectives offered by colonialism and imperialism, as well as innovations in scientific theory, psychoanalysis, and mechanical and technological advances; for historical events and trends that include industrialism and the metropolis, The Great War and its affect on the home front; for questions of place that consider London and Dublin, the countryside and the continent, nation and home; for shifting values surrounding social mores, class distinctions, gender roles, propriety, and morality; for the place of the individual in the collective, and for a sense of community in a modernity that privileges the autonomous individual. Authors will include Joseph Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen and Jean Rhys.